An Age of Panics
“In one word, excitement, anxiety, terror, panic, pervades all classes and ranks.”
Thus did one observer describe the onset of the Panic of 1837, which sent the entire American economy into a tailspin that lasted for years. Similar events, wreaking havoc with wages, commodity prices, investments, and government tax yields, struck at least once per generation from the 1830s to the 1930s, spinning the nation through a dizzying cycle of booms and busts. For much of this period, however, when Americans set about explaining these economic swings, they did so without the conceptual tools we take for granted today – data on supply and demand, indicators like GDP or the unemployment rate, and economic models of the relationship between interest rates and growth, for example.
Instead, they turned to technical and artistic images that told a range of stories about how the economy functioned, why it bounced men and women up and down with little warning, and what might be done to steady its fitful activity.
